Type
Site-specific architectural cut / wall trepanation
Location
1021 Prince Street, Washington–Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC), Virginia Tech, Alexandria,
Status
Semi-Permanente intervention (will be removed; documented through photographs)
Team
Project Co designed with Paul Emmons
Project Co executed with TeamWei-Chen Hung
Structure / Method
Conical wall cut passing through multiple rooms: compass-drawn circles, dense ring of drill holes, keysaw excision through gypsum board and metal studs; floor and ceiling layers peeled back to form a slanted light cone.
Materials
Existing gypsum board partitions, metal studs, insulation, carpet and ceiling tiles; graphite and marker layout lines; construction tape used as quipu-like tracer of the cut on the surface.
Funding / Research Framework
Produced as part of “A Broken House”, 2024–2025 Initiated Research Grant (SIRG), College of Architecture, Arts & Design, Virginia Tech.
Related Conference Presentation
Core ideas and images from this project fed into the paper “Katagraphics: Gilded Scars, Unruly Objects”, presented at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Annual Conference: Unruly Objects, University of Western Australia, Perth, 3–5 December 2025.
“The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer… allows one to dream in peace.”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Prince Cut: Afterworks is the second life of the wall cut. Once the cone has been opened and the building sutured, its images and leftovers migrate into the studio. There, the cut is re-drawn as a sequence of eleven collages that track the section from different angles—like film stills of the wound. Seams are intentionally left visible: edges misalign, tape spills over, pencil lines double the joints. The tape behaves like quipu or kintsugi, a knot-record and a repair at the same time, marking where things were once torn apart and rejoined.
The small round wall fragment becomes a sculpture: a compact fossil of the operation, carrying paint, paper, gypsum, and the ghost of the stud pattern. In the gallery, these afterworks turn a one-time intervention into a portable cosmogram. The office interior is no longer just exposed; it is re-edited, translated into an image-language that sits somewhere between Maya codex, Aztec pictorial history, and architectural drawing. The project shifts from cutting a specific building to thinking about cutting as a method for architectural history itself—how a canonical section can be fractured, rearranged, and read differently.
